Session title and description:
'Seeing the past through digital eyes: new approaches to visualizing medieval texts and artifacts'

What do we gain when our experience of a medieval text or artifact is through a digital object rather than the original? The answer will depend on what tools were used to create, find, and view the digital object. Today medievalists can access online a wealth of photographs of manuscripts and artifacts, and many repositories even allow researchers to use personal cameras to create their own photographs. The result has been a proliferation of visual material that enhance access, but which also raise new challenges and present novel opportunities for researchers. This session will bring together medievalists who use digital facsimiles and surrogates as part of their research to consider how the tools they use to capture, manipulate, sort and present them impact the character of their scholarship. These tools can help scholars espousing long established methodologies, but they may also enable them to pose new questions and extend the scholarship in previously impractical directions.